"She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in."

After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Unplugged

What a bizarre (almost) two months. I have been effectively almost unplugged from social media since the end of March, not because I made any special commitment to be, just because it kind of happened that way. Other than trolling Facebook for e-book deals and arbitrarily "liking" the cute things all my friends' babies keep doing (provided they were cute enough to fend off my irritation that everything in my Facebook feed is either somebody announcing they're pregant or posting a picture or story of their cute freaking baby, whose cuteness is often a subject of debate). Oh, and Instagram. I occasionally have the desire to prove by photographs that I do lots of fun and awesome things, so Instagram gets in there once in a great while, because, as it turns out, I, uh, don't do that many fun/awesome/photo-worthy things, but I mean, there was that one time I went to DC....

Anyhow, yeah, I haven't posted anything since Easter. It's more than likely that I've not commented on your posts, much less read them. Okay, I might have read some because Feedly is on my phone, and I need a dose of the bookish once in a while, but comments? Not so much. I have been traveling and having epic yard sales and cleaning the house and watching The West Wing and eating dinner with friends and driving to far places to eat dinner with other friends and not always making myself feel like I'm choosing to do the wrong thing. I expect more of the same in the near future.

You see, as soon as the sun came out and springtime came, any desire I had to boot up my laptop after yet another grueling day spent slaving away on the computer at work was totally lost. I've been addicted to my computer for so long that the thought that I could pretty much abandon it and not miss it has been astonishing me. As you might be able to tell by my sudden and probably unexpected reappearance I have, at least in part, started to miss it. But these last months have been good. It turns out that when I turn my computer off for a while I have so much more time to do all of the other things I enjoy that I forgot that I enjoyed - like keeping up with friends I get to see in person, hanging out with my family, watching great TV, and, you know, reading books without the looming task of having to always have something to say about them and being chained to my computer for most of every Saturday because weekdays are full of full-time jobs and assorted life responsibilities, not so much writing blog posts.

I have so very much enjoyed my two months, but at long last, I've found that I've missed being occasionally immersed in the bookish, ergo, this is not a farewell letter, as a few weeks ago it might have been following numerous days of navel-gazing over the wisdom of keeping up with such a demanding hobby that turned out to be so easy to lay aside for weeks and weeks. As it happens, I've started to miss reviewing books and seeing what my internetty friends are up to and so on and so forth.

So I am calling forth the latest of many lazy blogging renaissances in which I commit to being a suckier blogger than ever, but while I'm sucking, I will damn well be enjoying it on my own lazy, inconsistent terms. I'm sure I'll stop by and comment on your blogs in utterly sporadic fashion and will post content here in just as random a manner, and if you still read my ramblings I will be most certainly happy. I've been a little weary of blogging since it became about creating "an audience" and maintaining a "brand." I don't want to feel like I need to promote myself on sixteen different social media sites to be worth reading. When I started doing this, just reading and talking about books was enough, and it was easy and it was fun until things changed and it became hard work to keep up with the blogging hordes who started after me and rapidly surpassed me and blogging began to feel like another exercise in always feeling not quite good enough. So I'm flipping the off switch on building "my brand" and "my audience." I'm closing the door on stretching myself too thin throwing myself into all different kinds of social media and creating 650 unique ways for you to follow my blog. I'm not interested in challenging myself, and I probably won't be reading along, either. When I comment on your blog, I'm going to do it because I want to comment on your blog, not because I have some unhealthy need to get you to comment on mine or because I feel guilty for disappearing for *insert lengthy period of time here*.

I'm ready to cut some of the "fat" and the guilt off of my blogging and be more undependable than ever. If I lose readers that I haven't already lost, that's okay, I can learn to like talking to myself, and reviewing books can be its own reward. That said, I sure hope some people will still stick with me, because it's much more fun (not to mention less crazy) to talk with friends than to talk to myself.

And that is all, at least until the forthcoming reviews that will indeed be coming forth.

11 comments:

Huge round of applause! Do what makes you feel good, even (or especially) if that means going against the norm. People can get caught up in stupid stuff. It's good to sit back and really consider what you want from your chosen hobby. If it's no longer fulfilling-- change it ir let it go.

I think we've all been there...and sometimes multiple times. I'm about go to back there: unplugging for a bit or at least unplugging on, like you said, building a brand and an audience. It's a good place to be, not so caught up in the "drama": mostly self-created.

About Me

Hi, my name is Megan. I've always loved to read, and have more or less recently gained an appreciation for writing about the books I read as well as illuminating the unsuspecting public about the minutia of my daily life. And so was born Leafing Through Life. If you're looking to contact me - I can be found at toadacious1 at yahoo dot com.